With more than 250 vendors, this year’s VMworld 2014 exposition has been teaming with excitement all week. Flash storage, hyper-converged infrastructure, and cloud disaster recovery were some of the hot topics on the show floor.

In a whirlwind tour I met with several companies offering innovative solutions for your IT infrastructure. Some of the highlights from this year’s VMworld expo floor include:

Nutanix –Offering a line of highly scalable hyper-converged virtual compute appliances, Nutanix has been a pioneer in the hyper-converged infrastructure space. Suda Srinvasan, Director of Product Marketing, explained how Nutanix’s hyper-converged appliances bring web scale technology to the datacenter. Nutanix eliminates the need for a SAN by combining compute, networking, and storage into a single hyper-converged compute platform that can scale linearly by simply adding more appliances.

Atlantis Storage – Winner of this year’s Best of VMworld award for storage, Atlantis provides a software based storage solution that works with all types of backend storage products including SANs and VMware’s Virtual SAN. Gregg Holzrichter Vice President of Marketing at Atlantis Computing explained how Atlantis Storage began as a VDI-focused storage solution and then grew into a general purpose storage solution. The new Atlantis USX enables businesses to get up to ten times more storage capacity out of new or existing hardware by transparently deduplicating and compressing datasets.

Kaminario – Dani Golan Founder and CEO of Kaminario showed how Kaminario’s K2 All flash arrays provide big performance boosts for OLTP database workloads like SQL Server and Oracle as well VDI workloads like VMware’s Horizon View. Kaminario provides a scale-up and scale-out architecture that can simplfy your storage requirements by supportng mixed workloads on the same storage array. For instance you can mix VDI, OLTP, and OLAP on the same array without adversely affecting performance. To scale up you can add more storage to a given K2 unit. To scale-out you simply add more K2 units.

Vision Solutions – Migrating between multiple clouds is one of the toughest tasks for IT today. Tim LaPlante, Director of Product Management, demonstrated how Vision Solution’s Cloud Migration Center enables you to easily move VMs between multiple clouds like Amazon and Azure with just a few clicks. Cloud Migration Center runs as a service in Azure, and it is licensed per migration. The product is currently in tech preview and will be generally available next month.

HotLink – Managing multiple hypervisors is a difficult problem of IT today. Wwhen you throw in VMs that run in the cloud, management becomes even harder. Lynn LeBlanc, CEO & Founder of HotLink Corporation, and Oded Haner, HotLink CTO, showed me how HotLink Hybrid Express enables you to manage vSphere, Hyper-V, XenServer, KVM and even Amazon VMs from within the familiar VMware Infrastructure client. Oded also showed me how HotLink DR Express provides one click backup of VMs to Amazon for simple cloud-based DR.